The Xubuntu team is happy to announce the release of Xubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander Beta 1 today. Please note that this beta is not intended for use on production computers but for use in testing. Do not think it is “close enough” to done to be safe for your production machine and always back up your data.

With this beta, we hope to have all of the most important features ready. We now seek people to actively test and identify bugs so we can squash them before our final release. Updates to the experience have been made and we need feedback. The team also needs to learn what updates you feel need to be added to the offline documentation to make it even better.

Some of the highlights of the release include

New version of xfce4-settings with a new dialog to set up your monitors

To report a bug, please let the automatic reporting process work its way through. For when that doesn’t happen, please run ubuntu-bug followed by the package name to make a report. To file suggestions for improving our offline documentation, please run ubuntu-bug xubuntu-docs from the command line.

The final release of 13.10 is set for October 17, 2013. To find out more about how to contribute to Xubuntu and join in, see Getting Involved.